I always feel that blockchain is best at packaging things that are 'impossible to compute' into a beautiful vision of 'having economic incentives to do so.' The PoAI mechanism proposed by KITE AI is indeed very attractive. It claims to create a brand new consensus mechanism for the future Agent economy: by using data attribution algorithms to accurately measure the contribution of each data point and model to the outcome, and allocate rewards accordingly. This sounds like it aims to establish a comprehensive (labor law) for the Agent internet, creating absolute fairness among autonomous agents.
However, from a technical perspective, this may pose risks. It's like the 'Turkish robot' that was all the rage in 18th century Europe, which claimed to play chess automatically, but actually had a real person hidden inside. Will KITE AI's PoAI encounter similar issues? To ensure the efficiency of M2M payments, will it introduce centralized validators at the underlying level, turning the decentralized network into a sophisticated 'Turkish robot'?
To see this clearly, we need to analyze deeply. The technical goal of KITE AI is actually challenging a problem in computer science: how to decentralize the verification of computational results. In the PoW era of Bitcoin, verification was simple; miners had to perform a lot of hashing to find answers, but verifiers only needed a single hash operation to confirm results. This computational asymmetry is the basis of blockchain decentralization.
But in the AI era, KITE AI is no longer verifying simple hashes but rather complex deep learning reasoning and data attribution. Data attribution, especially the Shapley value algorithm it relies on, involves a massive amount of computation. To accurately calculate the contribution of a data point in the training set, it theoretically requires retraining the model countless times. Even if KITE uses approximation algorithms, the computational load remains very large.
This brings up a question: Ethereum often gets congested verifying simple smart contracts, how can KITE AI verify complex AI model contributions on-chain without sacrificing decentralization? If the verification cost exceeds the computational cost, PoAI would mathematically struggle to exist.
This raises doubts about whether KITE AI will repeat the mistakes of EOS, concentrating verification power into the hands of a few high-performance nodes in pursuit of speed, thus turning the Agent economy into a disguised cloud computing service.
Next, let's analyze the core component of PoAI: reasoning verification. In the design of KITE, when an Autonomous Agent completes a task and requests payment, the network needs to confirm that it has indeed completed the reasoning based on valid data. The white paper mentions that cryptographic proofs will be used to ensure integrity.
However, in practical applications, this brings about enormous data throughput. A single reasoning of a large language model may involve billions of floating-point operations. Although the generated zero-knowledge proof can compress the verification process, the generation time is still long and may take several minutes or even hours. What KITE AI promises is a sub-cent, millisecond-level M2M micropayment experience.
There exists a time lag between these two: payments require millisecond-level confirmation, while reasoning verification requires minute-level computation. To solve this problem, KITE AI is likely to introduce 'optimistic verification' or 'trusted execution environments' as a temporary solution. This means the system defaults to trusting the computational results of nodes unless someone raises a challenge.
But in a high-frequency trading network, who would be motivated to store vast amounts of reasoning historical data and initiate challenges? If the cost of challenging exceeds the potential benefits, then cheating becomes the rational choice. Ultimately, to maintain the system's operation, KITE may be forced to introduce officially operated 'gatekeeper' nodes to make final arbitration. This effectively means that the insiders of the 'Turkish Robot' are in place, and the decentralization of PoAI becomes nominal.
A deeper issue is the collapse of trust. If the verification logic of PoAI leans towards centralization or black-boxing, data attribution will turn into a power game. In the KITE AI ecosystem, data providers, model trainers, and application developers are all competing for KITE token rewards. If the attribution algorithm is opaque or controlled by a few PoS giants, then 'whose data is more valuable' will no longer be decided by the market, but by parameters.
For example, if a financial data module invested by PayPal Ventures is artificially given a high weight in the PoAI algorithm while community-developed open-source modules are down-weighted, ordinary developers will find it very difficult to detect. In complex deep learning models, the contribution of data itself is hard to quantify. This uncertainty provides space for rent-seeking.
Furthermore, this technical compromise poses a threat to the security of the Agent internet. If Autonomous Agents become accustomed to relying on centralized nodes for quick verification, the entire network is at risk of a single point of failure. Once insiders of the 'Turkish Robot' act maliciously, they can forge reasoning proofs, steal funds, or refuse to process transactions for specific agents. This is unacceptable for KITE.
In summary, KITE AI's PoAI mechanism currently resembles Schrödinger's cat; in the white paper, it is decentralized, but in practical applications, it is likely centralized. This 'technology on the surface, governance behind the scenes' structure is a paradox of KITE AI. It attempts to use the trust mechanism of blockchain to solve the black-box problem of AI, but the result may create an even larger black box.
For developers, it is important to be cautious: the algorithmic judge you rely on may just be a manipulated puppet.
At the dawn of the Agent economy, what we need is a truly reliable verification protocol, even if less efficient, but absolutely honest. If KITE AI cannot solve the reasoning verification problem before going live on the mainnet, the blueprint it depicts will ultimately be a pipe dream.
I am a sword-seeking boat, an analyst who only focuses on essence and ignores noise.
